void pointers?

This is a discussion on void pointers? within the C++ Programming forums, part of the General Programming Boards category; i've been playing around with fixed sized files and i decided that i want to create a templated class to ...

void pointers?

i've been playing around with fixed sized files and i decided that i want to create a templated class to work with them...just a simple database like interface. the will be 3 classes...one of type T (any kind of class [with a data member, duh] ), one which is a (container?) class called Record, and another class that is called, i dunno, FileManager... the record class will inherit from type T. Record only has one data member called Key, which is a pointer to a data member in type T...but i don't want it to point to a SPECIFIC data member...here, let me show you come code...

just to rephrase, say x and y are 4 bytes each, and i want the key to be id and to tell *key to dereference the data 8 bytes into the object foo......
but in another instantiation of type Record i want the key to dereference y..